I have been privileged to have a couple of intense weeks working with some great people on a project. I always find I learn so much from talented individuals working under pressure. It brings out the best in able professionals.
 
One specific lesson this reinforced for me is not worrying about the small things and concentrating on what really matters. I stayed in a hotel where the car park was hard to find locate – and then there was a choice between an expensive one really nearby and a cheaper one some distance away with an effective but complex transport connection. I got annoyed with the hotel because they did not explain all of this – I sort of found out by trial and error.
 
So I tried the further one – then it got really cold snowed and I kept getting back really late, so I caved in and went to the more expensive option. At dinner I regaled a senior colleague with my story - he said he did not even think about it. The work came first. A few extra pounds to save time and stress when we had plenty of that was not worth it – just pay the money, or have your employer or client pay.
 
It’s like insisting on economy travel for business executives to Singapore or Los Angeles and expecting them to go straight into a vital meeting. It’s being penny wise to be pound foolish. This phrase amazingly first appeared in the Spectator in 1712 in a completely different context.
 
I think a woman who will give up herself to a man in marriage, where there is the least room for such an apprehension, and trust her person to one whom she will not rely on for the common necessities of life, may very properly be accused (in the phrase of a homely proverb) of being “penny wise and pound foolish.
 
Clearly not very politically correct now but the origin of the phrase now more aptly summarised as making decisions with small amounts of money (pennies) that end up making bad sense for affecting larger amounts of money (pounds, as in Great British Pounds).
 
It is as Parkinson’s famous law says Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to take up the time available to finish it. So I you let the trivia rule your day you will be working until midnight.
 
Here’s a Harvard Business Review article on knowledge workers Make Time for the Work that Matters which states We’ve spent the past three years studying how knowledge workers can become more productive and found that the answer is simple: Eliminate or delegate unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones.
 
So worrying about trivia or car parks or having to fly coach when you have more critical work to do or prepare or rest up for is really a zero sum game - a situation in game theory in which one person's gain is equivalent to another's loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero.
 
As Thomas Jefferson said In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

In the old days of law firms when partnership numbers were restricted there seemed somehow to be more of a focus on developing staff to provide an excellent professional service to clients. As a result, individual professional ability was truly recognised and rewarded. The same was true in other professional practices.
 
However, over the last 30 years that approach has been replaced by an emphasis on financial return and making a profit with “rain makers” given more kudos and reward than those professionals who are excellent at their job but less good at bringing in clients. See this Thomson Reuters report on the “Profit motive” which pretty much reflects the status quo stating To stand out from the crowd and win new work, lawyers need to be good at more than the law.
 
I am not decrying this, just observing that the change has occurred, and it has had consequences for those of us who entered the professions, some good some bad. However, a recent Harvard Business School newsletter contained an article which with other technology driven developments made me wonder if this is changing yet again.  
 
The article was exploring the leadership benefits of recognising that “businesses had to contribute to society in meaningful ways, not just profit from it.” This is not just about being altruistic; organisations which embrace the concept of benefiting all stakeholders, customers, employees, shareholders and communities and indeed the environment will perform better.
 
Marc Benioff CEO of Salesforce captured this in a tweet  “In the world of these new connected products, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in this multi-stakeholder dialog that we have here at Davos, trust has to be the highest value in your company, and if it’s not something bad is going to happen to you.”
 
The same concept is developing in the context of IT service contracts where the traditional roles of supplier and customer are morphing into co-creation models as technology advances rapidly and all organisations seek to take advantage of the digital world. Co-creation can be defined as a management initiative, or form of economic strategy, that brings different parties together (for instance, a company and a group of customers), in order to jointly produce a mutually valued outcome.
 
Here is a Daily Telegraph article on the subject which comments on businesses today that Increasingly, the innovation they need to survive is the product of collaboration – where sharing skills, resources and expertise can help both parties to flourish.
 
I repeat I am not saying the profit motive is bad – far from it I recognise its benefits – many law firms have grown into successful global businesses and thrived on it. But I suggest we are beginning to realise now that it needs to work hand in hand with other motivations. Winston Churchill said that Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society. 
 
Martin Luther King was perhaps more forthright - We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. 
 
This interesting evolution seems to me to be an opportunity to embrace the future whilst bringing back a recognition of broader traditional professional values which had perhaps taken a back seat. This will ultimately benefit all of us whether we are advisers, customers, suppliers or indeed members of the community. Maybe as Bob Dylan famously sang the times they are a changin once again.
 
In these times of great political and potentially economic uncertainty this seems to me to be a very positive underlying trend for those of us working in the professions and for our clients and indeed for business generally.

I was at a dinner with some fellow lawyers a couple of years ago sitting at several long tables in a private room in a restaurant in Islington. It was fine at first but as the evening wore on a couple of the people sitting opposite me started to dominate the conversation so nobody else could get a word in edgeways.
 
We’ve all been there and it can be very tedious and not at all enjoyable, but actually we have a choice if we realise and decide to exercise it. I chose to get up and move to a vacant seat on another table where I had a much more productive conversation with some much more relaxed and interesting people who were interested in an exchange of views and not clever monologues.
 
There’s a great 1960’s book called I'm OK – You're OK by Thomas A Harris which is a practical guide to transactional analysis as a method for solving problems in life. Transactional analysis delineates three ego-states (parent, adult and child) as the basis for the content and quality of interpersonal communication. Rather than behaving as rational adults in communications with others we are vulnerable to the inappropriate, emotional reactions of our child and the uncritically learned behaviour programmed into our parent. However, in our “adult” state we can choose not to “play games” but rather to have a balanced I’m OK You’re OK conversation – as I in effect did at the dinner.
 
As Mark Twain said "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
 
The same is true in networking, working in a team or developing a business. If you don’t enjoy being with someone or working for a particular client the chances are the relationship will not ultimately be successful. I recall a client in private practice who was incredibly demanding when it came to wanting advice, but difficult to deal with and awfully reluctant to agree and pay our bills. Eventually we parted company even though they provided quite a lot of legal work.
 
See this Forbes article which suggests that  People ultimately choose to do business with people they like, and everyone likes someone who appreciates them. Or this article People Do Business with People They Know, Like, and Trust. It is not just getting on with people they have to trust you will work with them too – Zig Ziglar the motivational teacher and trainer said “If people like you they'll listen to you, but if they trust you they'll do business with you.”
 
Dale Carnegie the author of How to win Friends and Influence People summed it up "People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing." You cannot have fun if you do not get on and collaborate with the people you work alongside.
 
And more profoundly "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."– Charles Darwin.
 
Steve Jobs commented “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” We simply cannot do that if we do not get on with the people we do business with.

I was taking the dog out for a walk today on a grey gloomy winter morning feeling a little like it was a chore – he normally has a dog walker 3 days a week but over Christmas we have walked him every day. Then I met another dog walker a hundred yards or so up the track and he chatted and said what a wonderful day it was for a walk and to enjoy it.
 
And he was so right. It may have been grey but the woods I was in were still and there was a sense of peace and quiet away from the hustle and bustle of traffic (a dim sound in the distance). The deciduous trees were showing off the shapes of their bare winter branches and the conifers were dark green. I, and needless to say the dog, thoroughly enjoyed our walk.
 
As we went down a path covered in leaves through the forest this experience made me think how in our working lives in order to achieve the best results we actually should be living in and enjoying the moment. In a negotiation, in any meeting, paying full attention and fully concentrating on what is going on at the time as opposed to worrying about the previous or a future meeting – or something else entirely – tends to lead to far better results. A Cherokee Indian Proverb advises “Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.”
 
There was an interesting study in 2010 at Harvard University, described in this Harvard Gazette article Wandering Mind not a Happy Mind which starts People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.It describes how Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.
 
My dog clearly had no problem with being completely in the present but for me it was more difficult, and I had to make a conscious effort to do so and as Buddha advised “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
 
This short blog by Jenny Dearborn senior vice president and chief learning officer at SAP captures this need for “mindfulness” at work commenting that A stretched-thin, stressed-out workplace is not the workplace of the future. and Studies have found that mindfulness at work can increase engagement, productivity, innovation, and measurable business results.
 
It’s all very well having a great negotiating plan and a strategy but as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (Chief of Staff of the Prussian army before World War 1) famously said No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. So, we have to be alert to what is happening, picking up the nuances of speech and body language being presented to us – and it is impossible to do this when not really concentrating on the meeting at hand.
 
Apart from anything else, like me on my walk, we get much more out of living in the present at work and indeed at home and fully appreciating what is going on around us – to quote  Ralph Waldo Emerson Life is a journey, not a destination.
 
Here in this context is a profound and relevant quote from children’s literature and A. A. Milne:
 
 “What day is it?” asked Pooh. 
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favourite day,” said Pooh.”